


Lost/Found

by Munchkin47



Series: Ebb/Flow [2]
Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 08:57:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16426319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Munchkin47/pseuds/Munchkin47
Summary: Erik goes for a run and ends up in front of a dive bar, where he meets an annoying drunk.Prequel to Ebb/Flow.





	Lost/Found

Erik sat up in bed sluggishly.

The evening nap was only supposed to last half an hour, but it had ticked into three. In his dreamless sleep, he had floated along in peace, without the pain that plagued him in his waking moments. Erik was content to go to sleep forever, and never wake up. What was the point? When there was only torment awaiting him when he awoke.

But he did wake up, and he felt empty. He was unable to cry because it accomplished nothing. He felt completely, utterly destroyed.

There was a gentle knock on the door before it opened to reveal his mother.

‘ _Mutter_ ,’ Erik said. ‘I’m fine. I’m up.’

‘You missed dinner. Are you hungry?’

Erik got to his feet. ‘I’m not hungry. I’m going to go for a run.’

Edie looked at him in disapproval. ‘You’re supposed to be sitting shiva, Erik.’

He pulled on a clean sweater over his shirt, wondering how to tell his mother that he no longer believed in anything, let alone religious customs that did nothing to assuage the pain. ‘Where are Wanda and Peter?’

‘They’re asleep. It’s after nine, _mein Leibchen_ ,’ Edie said. ‘At least take a bottle of water with you.’

Erik grabbed a bottle of spring water from the fridge. Condensation began forming almost immediately under the heat of his hand. He left the house with nothing else but the bottle and phone.

At first he began a leisurely jog, hoping that the exertion would jolt the sluggishness and sleep out of his body. Then as he settled into a steady rhythm, he began to pick up the pace, enjoying the way his feet pounded against the pavement, feeling the shocks that radiated up his knees, and the way his thigh and calf muscles worked in tandem to help propel his body across the pavement. Putting one foot in front of the other meant his brain had to work hard to focus on the task. It meant he had no time to think of anything else.

As he huffed, his lungs began to burn from the reduction of oxygen intake.  He welcomed the struggle to breathe – it sharpened his senses. Deep in his veins, he could sense the presence of metal more acutely than ever.

He pushed himself until he could push no more. Until there was nothing left inside of him.

He collapsed onto the curb, chest heaving with exertion, his lungs practically gasping for air. He had barely avoided careening into a streetlight. His mouth was dry and throat parched, and almost struggled to lift his trembling arm to bring the water to his lips. His intense focus on running slowly expanded to his surroundings.

He was sitting right in front of a bar. Looked up at the garish sign, with a lit-up moon in the background. What a dive.

He watched as a man stumble out of the bar, step over his own feet. He gave a little shout, then his knees buckled. Erik watch him go down like a felled tree. The drunk landed on his back, a beached turtle, too drunk to be able to coordinate movements to flip over or sit up. ‘Help?’ the man groaned. ‘Help me.’

Erik ignored him, and took another swig of his water.

‘Help!’ the man shouted again. Then lapsed into incoherent giggles. Then he moaned. Erik shook his head.

The man began to shout again, in a most annoying fashion.

Erik rolled his eyes and sighed. Then he used the man’s watch and cuff links to pull him up into a sitting position. This was why he didn’t drink. Because drunks like that made drinking lose all appeal.

The man looked around, spotted Erik, and a wide lopsided grin split his face. ‘Groovy mutation,’ he said. ‘Was that you, man? You have mutant teenage ninja powers of metal manipulation?’ He had trouble saying the words “metal” and “manipulation”, and tried various garbled words before giving up.

Erik ignored him. The man crawled over to Erik, and then sat down next to him. ‘Hello,’ the man said.

Erik stared at him.

‘Hello,’ he said again. ‘My name is …’ he drifted off. ‘Ooooh, I don’t know my name. Do you know my name?’

‘No,’ Erik said shortly. He stood up. ‘You’re drunk. You should get home.’

The man leaned against Erik’s leg and whispered, ‘I don’t know my name. Ish my name Francis? I think my name is Francis, I’ve never liked it. Named after St. Francis. Not St. Francis of Assisi. The other one. The non-Italian one.’

Erik turned to face the man. ‘Get off me,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll kick your head in.’

The man smiled stupidly at him. ‘Oh, you have an itty-bitty German accent? You’re very handsome.’ He pointed to Erik’s groin. ‘You look like you have a nice package there? What is it the Germans say in Deutschland? _Das_ big schlong?’

‘No one says that,’ Erik enunciated coldly, after a very long, awkward pause. ‘Stop touching me.’

‘OK, OK,’ the man said, but did not let go. Erik gingerly pulled back his leg, and Francis fell over on the curb. ‘Don’t leave me,’ he cried. ‘I’m scared. I don’t want to be alone!’

Yeah, you and everyone else, buddy, Erik thought savagely. He had half a mind to fling this idiotic drunk across the road.

‘Nooo, don’t throw me onto the road. A car will crash into me and hit me and I’ll go flying. I don’t want to fly.’

Erik was startled. He wondered if this drunk was a …

‘Psychic? Yeaaaaaah, I am,’ Francis said. ‘I can read your thoughts. You’re very loud, you know.’ He lifted up two fingers and placed them against his temple. ‘You want to sit down? I’ll give you a psychic reading, charge of free. Free charge. Free of charge,’ he corrected himself.

‘No, thanks,’ Erik said icily.

‘Sit,’ Francis said.

And Erik obeyed the message that his mind received with complete obedience. He sat down. What the actual fuck.

‘Trippy, right?’ Francis giggled again, and waggled his fingers. ‘I can make you do whatever I think. But I won’t. Is your name Erik? You’re very good looking.’ Then Francis closed his eyes, his fingers still against his temple. He went silent.

Erik stared at him. Had he fallen asleep?

Then suddenly, he felt as if his mind had been opened up, like a book with its pages being flipped at the edges. His life, his memories, his thoughts, all exposed and sifting through, and not very carefully either. He realized that the psychic next to him was rifling through his thoughts. The fucker was in his head!

Erik’s hand came up instinctively, and he honed in on the metal of the man’s stainless steel watch, grasped it, and threw him into the closest parking meter.

‘Ouchhhh …’ Francis said, already getting up, then struggling and falling back on his ass again. ‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘I don’t like that!’

Erik felt himself rooted to the ground, frozen, unable to move.

Francis slowly crawled back to him, sulking. ‘I wasn’t done.’ He then leaned his head against Erik’s shoulder. ‘What was I doing again? Oh yeah.’

Erik went back to seeing the memories in his head, like it was a damn movie. Snippets and flashes and reels of memories played in his head at super-speed, before finally arriving at where he was. He came back to reality with an unpleasant thump, and a sharp pain in his head. A headache began brewing behind his eyes.

‘Oh no,’ Francis said. ‘Oh no.’

Erik pressed two fingers to his eyes, suddenly feeling the urge to pull the parking meter out of the ground and hitting the motherfucker with it. He breathed heavily, trying to control his anger.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the stranger began crying. Great, genuine, wallowing fat tears leaked out of the corner of his big baby blue eyes. Erik stared.

‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ Francis choked out.

His blood froze like ice. It shouldn’t have come as any surprise, he thought. The man had been rifling through his head, pulling out all sorts of things. And yet it hurt more than he could imagine to hear Francis say it.

It was as if he had taken Erik’s pain into himself, and responded in the only way possible – grieving openly and painfully.

Erik sat next to Francis, shoulders touching each other, listening to him weep.

He had been almost embarrassed, hearing Francis carry on like that, displaying his sorrow so unreservedly and publicly. Yet a big part of Erik, deep down inside, cried alongside this stranger who had penetrated so deeply into his mind to find what was beneath the ash that was once his heart.

It was an unconventional sort of catharsis, to have someone do something Erik had not been able to do for himself.

‘Magda was so beautiful,’ Francis said, hiccupping, wiping his tears away with his dirty shirt cuffs. ‘It was so unfair. But you loved her so much. I’m so sorry. You’ll have to live with this loss for the rest of your life.’

‘I know,’ Erik said. And in a strange way, he had come to accept it.

‘So much anger. So much pain. You can’t keep holding onto it. You’ll drown. You have to let go,’ Francis said.

‘I can’t,’ Erik whispered. ‘It’s all I have left.’

‘Oh, but!’ Francis said. ‘Your beautiful children! It wasn’t their fault, Erik. You can’t think that way. She protected them, made sure they were safe. And no, it’s not your fault just because you did some bad things.’

Francis patted his pockets carefully, as carefully as a drunk could anyway, and pulled out a folded sheet of laminated paper. He opened it almost delicately. ‘Gabrielle gave me this today,’ Francis said. ‘She said I could keep it. She said she was pregnant.’

It was a black and white ultrasound picture of a white –gray blob floating in a sea of black.

‘It’s a picture of a baby!’ Francis said enthusiastically through the streaks of tears. ‘It’s my baby! Here’s the nose, and the arm waving hi, and that’s the foot with five toes,’ Francis pointed to the completely wrong things on the upside down sonogram, but Erik nodded along. ‘But she doesn’t want it. She wants to give the baby away.’

His face crumpled.

‘I’m his daddy! He’s my baby! And I’ll never get to have him, ever,’ Francis sobbed. ‘I want him so badly. I want to be like you. Cuddling Peter to sleep, and feeding Wanda in her high chair.’ He gripped Erik’s arm so hard his knuckles were white. ‘They deserve nothing but love,’ he said. ‘They’re just little babies.’

Erik sat there silently, suddenly regretting his behavior the last few days. They were too young to understand that they had lost their mother. It had made it so much easier to walk away from them, leave them to Edie. They deserved better.

‘I can do it,’ Francis whispered.

‘Do what?’ Erik asked.

‘I can make the pain go away,’ Francis said. ‘I’ll magic all the bad things away, leave you with only the best. I can make you happy again.’

For a moment there, he was truly tempted. It made him feel small, ashamed at his own cowardice. But god, the pain was unendurable. The grief had destroyed what was left of him when Magda took a piece of his soul with her.

But Francis was there in his head, now slowly flashing images of Erik’s own memories – of his wedding day, Magda’s pregnancy, and the birth.

‘No,’ he gasped, ‘I want to keep them! I don’t care how much it hurts, it’s all I have left of her.’

Admitting it finally burst that bubble he had been in. His head slowly began to clear.  

‘You’re not alone. Erik, you’re not alone. You still have your children,’ Francis said.

‘Please leave it alone. The pain,’ Erik said. ‘I don’t want to forget.’

Francis nodded emphatically, his head bobbing violently. ‘It’s OK, you don’t have to forget. I’ll forget. I’ll make myself forget, so you don’t have to forget.’

Erik was about the question the logic of that, but shrugged. The man was so fucking drunk he wouldn’t remember anything the night before. If he wanted to erase his own memory, then so be it.

Francis began folding the now battered sonogram and slipping it into his pocket, not realizing that he missed completely. The sonogram floated to the ground.

Erik picked it up just as a cab rounded the corner. ‘Taxi!’ he shouted, flagging it down. He tucked the sonogram carefully into Francis’ pocket. ‘You know, he’s your baby too. You have to fight for him if you want him. He’s going to be your everything, I promise.’ He whistled again at the taxi as it came barreling down the road.

‘Nice whistling,’ Francis began blowing air out of his mouth in a lousy attempt to whistle. He licked his lips. ‘Tastes funny,’ he said to himself.

‘Do you know the way home?’ Erik asked. ‘What’s your home address?’

‘Oh yes,’ Francis recited his address perfectly. He grinned, proud of himself. Then with a gagging sound, he heaved, and puked on the ground, spraying some of it onto Erik’s sweater and pants.

Erik glared, took a step back. He carefully stripped off his sweater and tossed it into the trash.

Blissfully out of it now, Francis snuggled up against the parking meter and closed his eyes.

The cab driver poked his head out of the window. ‘Aw man, I don’t want to drive a stinking drunk home, dude!’

Erik gave him his best menacing glare, and pulled out his phone. Under the case, he took out his credit card and handed it over to the driver. ‘A hundred should make it worth your while,’ Erik said, rattling off Francis’ address. ‘Get this man home safely, and if you do anything stupid I’ll find you and fuck you up.’

‘Relax, man!’ the taxi driver grinned toothily at him as he swiped the card and returned it to Erik. ‘I got it. I’ll make sure your buddy gets home safe.’

Erik ran into the bar, got a few napkins and a glass of water, briefly cleaned Francis up, and shoved him into the taxi none too gently, then maneuvered the seat belt around his body so he was strapped in.

He leaned close, and patted the nearly unconscious man on the shoulder. He didn’t know what else to say. So he shut the cab door and banged it twice, and watched the taxi roar away into the night.

He wondered if they would ever meet again. Maybe not. He hadn’t caught Francis’ last name.

He hoped that Francis would have a nice life.

Erik began to walk home. He wanted to see his own babies, hold them. They were what’s left of Magda.

He felt like he had been swimming through the murky depths of a heavy swamp, and had finally spied a light above him. He was ready to follow the light.

When he broke surface and breathed, the first deep gulp of air was bittersweet, tinged with the strange metallic taste of hope. 

 


End file.
